The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  She had always taken a metal fire-bowl into the tent with her, for burning incense. It was one of the many ironies of her career that incense was not a Lamaroon tradition. It had first been introduced to Ferupe by eleventh-century explorers who traveled to the far-off Asias. Seven centuries later, it was popular in many parts of the continent, and the cheapest and .best sorts all came from Cype; but it had never caught on in Lamaroon, perhaps because people there were too poor for frivolities, and uninterested in mysticism, or perhaps because the natural smells of that island country were so powerful and delightful that no artificially produced scent could compete. But then again, almost none of the accessories Anuei used to set the mood in her tent were authentically Lamaroon. In the nineteenth century, Lamaroon—Anuei had philosophically told her son—was just too much like a hotter Ferupe. At least the Lamaroon that people knew was. Authenticity would have bored them. Most of the props were Cypean trash-deco, with the odd trinket from Izte Kchebuk’ara.

  And here the circus was on the Cypean border again, and Anuei had told her son she’d asked Saul Smithrebel, as a special favor which everyone had known he would grant her, because he always did, to show the outskirts of Gilye for three days straight while she made a shopping expedition into the Cypean sector to replenish her supplies of incense, glass beads, tattoo inks, and suchlike. The border between Ferupe and Cype, as it had most recently been redesigned, cut straight through the city. Anuei had told Crispin that this time he was old enough to accompany her. He anticipated the trip with avid curiosity. The roustabouts had tried to scare him with horror stories about Cypean ghosts and vampires and religiosos—he half expected that as soon as he and Anuei crossed that invisible line down the middle of Border Street, these oddities would start popping out of the walls; he wanted to be able to report to his older friends that they hadn’t. All his friends were grown men, but he did not consider them any different from himself. At twelve, he stood on the borderline; his childish curiosity was beginning to be tinged with the darker, more dangerous curiosity of the adolescent. He had just been initiated into the firing of daemon rifles, and promoted to the roster of sentries who stood duty every night outside the circled trucks.

  It was a combination of these things that made him, for the first time in his life, risk breaking his mother’s heart. He wanted to witness her exotic dancing and her inking of tattoos on stunned men’s biceps and backs. Surely, even if she discovered him, she was pleased enough with him at the moment, as evidenced by the offer of the shopping trip, that her heart wouldn’t break?

  And she couldn’t discover him!

  What he did not know as he wormed under the edge of the black top, having coaxed a reluctant Millsy to stand guard while he worked out one of the tent pegs, was that Anuei’s heart was going to break—or rather to pop, as a result of her obesity and a particularly unnatural sexual position—that very afternoon. The inside of the tent was black after the dazzling eastern sun. Wriggling under the canvas, laying it flat behind him so that not a crack of light should enter, he found himself in a narrow curtained-off space full of boxes. He eased them aside to make room to kneel. His fingers itched to lift the lids of the boxes—anticipating wetness, smoothness, lumpiness, he did not know what—but he sought the overlap between the curtains. He could already hear the sounds. Such sounds, inadequately disguised by the chirping of Anuei’s rare birds!

  The curtains were heavy and dark red. Cheeks burning with shame, Crispin eased them apart just far enough to see.

  Gilye, everyone agreed, was a strange city. None of the performers or roustabouts liked it. They hailed from northern and central Ferupe, and they did not like the east in general. During the middle hours of the day, Gilye was deserted; at night, it came alive with gaslight and crowds and weird, tuneless tinkly-tonk music. But the Gilyanese, like most easterners, thought entertainment was as important as food and sleep—that was because they were all half-Cypean, the Old Gentleman maintained—and so they flocked to the circus, not knowing or caring that Smithrebel’s was just a mud show. They had never seen Murk & Nail’s, or Gazelle’s, or the Stix Brothers’. To them, Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show was as exotic as their honky-tonk music was to the Ferupian circus band. “And that’s why we keep coming back here!” the Old Gentleman railed when his people grumbled. “Where d’you think your salaries come from when we’re stuck in some western dirthole? Eh? They come from these sons of bitches and their triple-Queen-damned Cypean trade route! Now who says I don’t know about saving for a rainy day?”

  It was on the eastern swing before last, Anuei told her son with an artful mist in her eyes, that she had met Joe Kateralbin, Crispin’s father.

  “He told me he loved me,” she said.

  He had come to see her act. Then he had come again. And again. And again, paying twice what she charged each time.

  “First I didn’t believe him when he said he couldn’t live without me. Then he signed on as a roustabout—one of our men did run off with a Cype girl. And after that he didn’t talk to me no more, just sat staring at me with those big sad eyes across the fires at night. Couple of months down the road, I had to believe him.”

  She sighed nostalgically. Crispin, as a child, had pressed her to continue. The middle of the story varied—Anuei enjoyed inventing romantic vignettes too much to keep repeating the same thing over and over—but it always ended the same way. “Joe couldn’t stand this cold northern climate. He got feverous. He needed the sun, that man, like you and me need air. I nursed him for weeks—you being just a new baby I wasn’t performing anyhow—but he died no matter what. Aah!” She pulled a horrible face. “Saul cried crocodile tears at Joe’s graveside, him. He was joyous!”

  And the postscript of the story, which Crispin recited in silence, grinding his teeth, was that after Joe Kateralbin’s death Saul had got Anuei back.

  Crispin did not know, of course, that Saul had had her to himself all along; that the stories of Joe were an elaborate fiction created by Anuei because she hated Saul and was ashamed of having let him father her child; that she had chosen his surname because there had been a roustabout named Kateralbin who died of fever around the time of Crispin’s birth. Crispin had no ties to the east except the ones of which he convinced himself. In the fullness of time he would find out the truth. By then, he would feel so strongly about the east that that particular element of Anuei’s fiction would have passed into reality. But now he was only twelve, and it was the middle of the day in that hot city where he believed Anuei had met Joe, and the customers drifting along Smithrebel’s tiny midway were probably the only people awake in the entire city, for most of the circus people, too, had succumbed to the heat and were resting in the trucks before the evening performance. And inside the incense-gloom of the black top, Crispin watched in terror as flames sizzled in Anuei’s hair and leapt up the painted hangings. The rare birds beat against their cages. Anuei did not move even when the fire caught her wooden beads (she wore nothing else) and spread to her pubic hair. The john was long gone—he had gibbered, setting the fire, and slipped out as silently as a thief—and Crispin knelt paralyzed behind the curtain, tears pouring down his cheeks.

  Only when the smoke got thick enough to throw him into a spasm of coughing did he move. He struggled out from under the side of the tent, choking, his eyes running. Millsy had been waiting anxiously outside; he wondered why Crispin had not yet reemerged, but he hadn’t seen the threads of smoke escaping through the seams of the tent. He tried to catch Crispin, but the boy eluded him. Sobbing, Crispin dashed toward Sunflower 1, shouting for Saul. “Old Gentleman! Old Gentleman! Anuei—fire—the fucking bastard—help—fire—”

  In his terror, Crispin had used his private name for Saul, and so neither Smithrebel nor anyone else knew who he was calling. But his distress alerted a good number of locals and midway vendors. When they saw the flames bursting from the roof of Anuei’s tent, the crowd dissolved briefly into chaos, but inside a minute everybody was organiz
ing one of those spontaneous efforts to combat disaster which some say are a measure of our humanity. A local man, a complete stranger, took it on himself to crawl into the black top and try to rescue Anuei. It was far too late, of course. By the time Saul arrived oh the scene four minutes later, the flames had been put out, and Crispin, hysterical for the second and last time in his life, was being held back from the steaming wet ruin.

  Some of Anuei’s props were salvaged—although Crispin never found out what happened to them after that (he suspected Saul of confiscating them). But the Balloon Lady herself was unsalvageable. The exotic dancer, the skilled prostitute, the tattoo artist, the mother of one and lover of one who wept all night for her (Crispin in the multiple arms of the Flying Valentas, Saul alone), the woman who had had the distinction of being the only full-blooded Lamaroon performing in a Ferupian circus at that time—Anuei Eixeiizeli was three-quarters cremated already.

  Saul canceled both the performances that night. No one objected. Anuei had been better loved than she had been appreciated. They cremated the rest of her on the spot. The Gilyanese came in crowds to see the circus, and when they found that it was off, they stayed to watch the funeral pyre. Some of them helped the festival atmosphere along by setting off fireworks and tossing strings of red crackers into the fire. Others started a tuneless, catchy Cypean chant. Crispin was staring miserably into the fire when he found himself caught up in an impromptu conga line snaking around him. A toothless, grinning Cypean woman gripped one of his hands; a boy a few years older than himself took the other. His feet were drawn into the stamping, shuffling dance step. The other boy bent forward and shouted, “Sing up!” Timidly, Crispin added his voice to the chorus. Soon he was singing so loudly and being tugged about so fast that the tears were dry on his cheeks. He could not cry. He could not even think.

  Saul and Millsy both found the Gilyanese people’s disrespect horrendous. Joining forces for what was probably the first time in their lives, they encouraged the Ferupian roustabouts to break up the party. The locals departed, cursing quietly. Saul shot their dirty looks back at them; he was thinking, wildly, that Gilye no longer seemed so hospitable, and that with Anuei gone there was no reason to stay, they’d move on this very night, yes, move on, and with an armed man riding on the roof of every truck—

  Detached from his companions, his back to the dying bonfire, Crispin scuffed his feet in the dust. The night wind blew cold. The stars shone faintly overhead, misted by the lights of the circus lot.

  Saul’s hand closed on his shoulder.

  10:37 A.M.

  Kherouge: Center City: the Enclave of the Most Patriotic

  Consecrated Sisters

  Sun-time

  “My blood is Royal!” chanted Rain with the others. “My body is Royal!”

  The pianola’s slow, majestic chords rolled out from the back of the chapel like waves of sound, breaking over the veiled heads of the Consecrated, whence the foam of voices rose. Rain knelt in the back row, where the pianola was loudest. Sister Fairday clasped her right hand, Sister Breeze her left. The chapel was full of summer dust—right outside the windows lay the courtyard in the middle of the Enclave—and the musky incense the Consecrated used to combat the dust added to the weight of the air: but by moving her head infinitesimally to one side or the other, she could smell Fairday and Breeze’s good, familiar soap-and-onions perfume. The women prayed slowly, in a manner that tested both vocal pitch and lung capacity, prolonging each word on note after downsliding note, so that what might originally have been conceived as a hymn became a mantra. Repeat after repeat, Rain’s lips and lungs formed the words on their own, and her mind wandered where it had been wandering far too often lately: out of the Enclave, out of the familiar streets of Kherouge, into the vast, terrifying, scintillating world where she had been Rae, and from which she had fled. The memories of that flight still gave her nightmares. She was all of twenty-one now, and a mother, and she had been safe in the Enclave for two years. But she still cried in her sleep. And Breeze had to slide into bed with her and hold her to keep her from scratching herself as she clutched for the silver amulet that no longer hung around her neck. She’d had to discard the amulet when she entered the Enclave, along with the gowns Master Player Authrond had given her, and his necklaces and earrings. Silver made the Royals’ skin break out; and a Sister wore only black.

  But amulet or no amulet, even with nothing to remind her of the past, her mind still wandered. The letter she had received from Okimako worried her. She could remember her mother mentioning a sister in Kirekune, but she had not imagined the woman was still alive, far less up to locating a long-lost niece, and she had never heard of any of the other family members Sala Ash mentioned. She did not know whether to reply, or what to say. She did not know how Sala Ash had found her. That was worrying, too. And her mind slid farther back into the past: to the toothlike tower, and Colonel Sostairs, the author of the worst pain she had ever felt; to Master Player Authrond. Had he grieved when she ran away? Had he found another floozy yet?

  Finally, inevitably, her thoughts went to him. She always ended up thinking of him. It saddened her that she had forgotten his face. She remembered only striking details: his massive, callused hands, the thin white marks on his huge pectorals, the way he had felt inside her when they made love, she biting her lips not to cry out because the orphaned boy was sleeping right there beside them. Where might he be now? And where was Crispin?

  They were both dead, they had to be dead, and she hoped they were, prayed they were, for she wished them well. She wished them the bliss of the Royal embrace, not the dreariness and pain of sun-time.

  She wished Crispin dead. She wished him here.

  No!

  “My heart is Royal!”

  Sunlight slanted through the window slits. They had already been kneeling for over two hours on the stone-flagged floor of the chapel. Rain’s knees were throbbing, and her back ached. She welcomed the pain as a distraction from her thoughts of him. But her discomfort brought a different, equally familiar worry. Why was it that she could no longer lose herself in prayer as she had been able to in her first year with the Consecrated?

  “My offspring is Royal!”

  It wasn’t that her thoughts were wrong—no thoughts were wrong, for there was no wrong, only a single Right—but thinking distracted her from praying.

  As always, the first order of the day after their morning chores had been communion with the Resident Royals. Communion drained her of any lingering sleepiness, leaving her with a marvelous sense of lightness and emptiness that was the closest thing to bliss anyone could achieve in sun-time. After communion, she generally sailed through the subsequent three hours of hymns and cued prayer on wings of pure spirituality. The blooming heat of a Kherouge summer could do nothing to wilt that energy. Each word from whichever Sister was leading the prayer sparked chain reactions of understanding in the bright emptiness of her mind.

  But lately she had been coming out of the confessional more tired than euphoric. And her mind had been drifting unconscionably.

  The sun would be high in the sky before they ate anything. But she could already feel her stomach growling.

  It was probably just the fatigue of Jonathan’s birth, lingering on longer than normal because she was not yet accustomed to the life.

  “Consecrated—my laughter! Consecrated—my tears! Consecrated—my breath! My sun-time is Royal!”

  Her Sisters would care for her if she became sick. Her Sisters would not let her fail.

  “My body is Royal!”

  Jonathan was only six months old, He was still suckling. She nearly lost her place in the chant as she imagined the piercing cries that would greet her when she hurried to the nursery to give him a feed before noon. Only six months old, and he could scream like a vulture.

  “My blood is Royal!”

  Six months old and still so ugly—

  (His little hands and feet were as well developed as those of an infant three ti
mes his age, and he was already beginning to sit up—it was unnatural—)

  So ugly!

  Jonathan. My son.

  Where is the one who should have been his father?

  “My heart is Royal!”

  An expression of pure joy shone on the face of Cloud, Speaking Sister. She clawed the air above her head, reaching for the ceiling. Cloud was a stout woman—she had borne seven offspring—but right now she looked as though she might fly weightless through the roof, her black robes flapping like birds’ wings. The pianola chords swelled, The women raised their voices in the final cadenza of the hymn, and the very dust that danced in the walls of sunlight seemed to vibrate. The barking of a courtyard dog outside was almost inaudible. “My offspring is Royal!”

  Oh, dear Queen, my Queen, do something

  But at that moment in the depths of the palace-fortress in Kingsburg, the Queen was not doing anything at all. Lithrea the Second floated on a sea of cushions in the sixth parlor of the Royal suite nine stories below the ground, her face a dark, wrinkled little raisin in the magnificent candy of her morning gown, whose ruff stood up behind her head like the frill of a lizard. Her bib of jewels encircled her neck as tightly as a collar. The total weight of the gown was about forty pounds. She could not have moved so much as an arm without help.